Book Review: “White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chess Board", by Daniel Johnson

Daniel Johnson, “White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War
Was Fought on the Chess Board,” Houghton Mifflin, 2008.

For something that is neither war, per se, nor sexual love,
chess has supplied fine fodder for literature. To establish that, you have to
look no further than to classics like Vladmir Nabokov’s "The Defense” and
Stefan Zweig’s "Chess Story”. For more recent examples, you can consult
Walter Tevis’s "The Queen's Gambit" (1984), Paolo Maurensig’s
"The Luneburg Variations” (1997), and Ronan Bennett’s "Zugzwang"
(2007). These are gripping fictions, and as indebted to chess for their plots
and character studies as “War and Peace”, say, was to the Napoleonic Wars, or
Faulkner’s novels were to his fictional Yoknapatawpha
County. In fact, writers of all kinds resort to chess as if it were a sort of
communal Yoknapatawpha.

And it’s not just the written word that chess fructifies,
but media ranging from high art (Marcel Duchamp) to television. Consider, for
example, “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” — the network sequel to the
Arnold science fiction movies. Chess insinuates itself into the plot in the
form of a computer program named The Turk — so called in honor of the famed
nineteenth automaton that bedeviled many onlookers into believing it won by
purely mechanical means. In “The Sarah Connor Chronicles”, a digital Turk may
be guilty of infecting defense department computers with the spark of
artificial intelligence they need to boot up the machine consciousness that
turns against the human race.

But let’s get back to books, and at once admit that a focus
on chess by no means assures quality. Clinkers do occur, demeaning both chess
and literature, while spawning an adoring fan base. In the case of Katherine
Neville’s “The Eight” (1988), the fan base likely overlaps that of Dan Brown’s
super clinker, “The Da Vinci Code”. Neville, like Brown after her, proceeds
like a coal company that conceives of mining as a process of decapitating
mountains, leaving blasted, flattened terrains. Neville does much the same to a
cast of characters that includes Napoleon, Voltaire, William Blake, and Catherine
the Great, in a plot centering on the mystical endowments of an ancient chess
set.

Neville seems unsure about exactly what powers this set
confers on its owners. Military dominion? Eternal life? Is the set a
philosopher’s stone or does it perhaps provoke the Rapture? One thing the set
clearly does not impart is any knowledge of chess itself, but then, how could
it when it magically came into being millennia before chess was invented?
Neville’s writing seems, likewise, to have originated well before any standards
had been arrived at for decent prose. A character with an urgent need for the
ladies room says she feels “a little puckered around the bladder.” That sort of
writing puckers on for close to six hundred pages. “The Eight” has generated a
sequel, “Fire.” Despite my strong belief that a reviewer should never damn what
he has not read, I’m going to make an exception for “Fire”, and say, sight
unseen: Puck it.

Daniel Johnson’s recent, “White King and Red Queen: How the
Cold War Was Fought on the Chess Board”, is a different sort of chess book
entirely. To start with, it’s non-fiction, and leaves no doubt that the author,
a founder of the English conservative monthly, “Standpoint”, cares and is
deeply knowledgeable about the game. The problem is that he cares about his
neo-conservative politics perhaps more. The first pages of the book, in which
Johnson salutes a “circle of American friends” without whom he would not have
achieved “moral clarity”, give fair warning: Johnson’s friends are the grand
dragons of neo-conservatism — Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Midge
Decter among them.

Surely there is room for politics in a book describing the
role chess played in the Cold War. But Johnson’s wields his moral clarity like
a bludgeon, and batters the book with it. He seems unable to trust readers to
understand that Stalinism was monstrous, and can hardly turn down any
opportunity to remind us. He writes, for example, that: “Despite its veneer of
Marxist ideology, and European culture, the Soviet Union was a reversion to
Ivan the Terrible’s oriental despotism.” OK, no argument. But do proclamations
of that kind need to burst out nearly every other page?

Johnson’s thesis is that chess was nothing less than sublimated
war between the US and the USSR. Rooks, knights, bishops, kings, queens and
pawns took the place of nuclear missiles, which made the chessboard a
ferociously contested battlefield. Johnson’s thesis is complicated by his
palpable nostalgia for the Cold War. Not only was the Cold War good for chess —
never were more Westerners aroused by the game than when Bobby Fischer met
Boris Spassky for the championship in 1972 — it was even better for moral
clarity. Moral clarity may be, for Johnson, “increasingly rare today” but was
abundant “in a bipolar world divided by the Iron Curtain.”

Johnson’s love for chess contends bravely throughout with
his addiction to polemic. He provides an engaging history of the game and
attends to a key psychological question associated with it, namely: Does
obsession with chess rescue you from madness or drive you to it? As retold by
Johnson, the career of refusenik Natan Sharansky, which was played out in a
context of exceptional moral clarity, yields an answer.

In 1978, Sharansky, who had been arrested by Soviet
authorities, was sentenced to thirteen years hard labor, including time in
solitary confinement. While in solitary, Sharansky, on a daily basis, replayed
a chess game he had once lost, following it out mentally down to “ten, twenty,
thirty, even forty moves.” That he eventually arrived at a winning position
mattered less to him, he wrote, than the fact that chess “helped preserve my
sanity.”

At the beginning of his book, Johnson observes that the
world is no longer the bipolar place it was when Fischer beat Spassky, or when
Sharansky played chess against himself in mental refuge from Soviet
persecution. Johnson suggests that a new “golden age of chess” may be at hand,
“presaged by the fact that the fifteenth world chess champion [Viswanathan
Anand] is, for the first time, neither European nor American, but Indian.”
Perhaps, Johnson suggests, “in the twenty-first century, Asia is reclaiming its
lost supremacy in chess.”

This is a nice point but Johnson might have taken it
further. He might, in his global survey of the game, have noted not only that
an Asian is the champion of what is properly known as international chess, but
that millions of people play an Asian variant of the game, known as Chinese
chess or Xiangqi. Xiangqi is far more popular in Asia than international chess
is here; it’s much more a folk sport, and routinely attracts the sort of
attention only something on the order of a Fischer-Spassky matchup galvanizes
for international chess. Not yet but perhaps soon, it will be provincial to
write about chess as if the form we take for granted in the West is the only,
and presumably the foremost, variant to have evolved out of India fifteen
hundred years ago. And perhaps, at some point, along with exposure to Xiangqi,
we will garner an inkling of the sorts of art and literature it has, over its
own long history, inspired.